Two former governors examine what states can do, can’t do and should do regarding environmental issues. Excerpted from “Risk and Resilience,” June 19, 2013.

BILL RITTER, JR.,  Former Governor, Colorado

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN, Former Governor, New Jersey; Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

In conversation with:

GREG DALTON, Director, Host, Climate One

 

GREG DALTON: Seventy percent of Americans recognize climate change is real; 54 percent say its effects have already begun. That’s according to an April poll by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Prospects for a comprehensive national plan to lead America from brown to green energy remain grim, given the current political stalemate in the nation’s capital. The story in state capitals is more promising. Twenty-nine states have goals for generating electricity from renewable sources, though many are considering relaxing those efforts. States are also leading the way in dealing with severe weather: Rising seas, fierce forest fires, searing droughts and historic floods are hitting just about every state in the country

We’re pleased to have with us two former governors whose states have confronted severe weather head-on. Bill Ritter Jr. was Democratic governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011. He’s currently director of the Center for a New Energy Economy at Colorado State University. Christine Todd Whitman served as the first woman governor of New Jersey, from 1994 to 2001. She was a member of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet as administrator of the U.S. EPA from 2001 until 2003. She’s currently head of the Whitman Strategy Group, a business consulting firm.

Governor Whitman, can you tell us where you were when Super Storm Sandy hit New Jersey, and how that affected you?

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: I was home, on the farm. My husband has a way of disappearing for major events like this, so he wasn’t around. We had a lot of warning. However, we don’t live anywhere near the shore. We are in central western Jersey, on a farm.

It was really the most interesting thing to me; the day before, walking in the woods, there wasn’t a sound to be heard – not a bird, nothing. It was dead quiet, and it was eerie. You noticed it right away. When the storm hit, we – far away from the shore – still lost over 100 trees; we had to replace about half the barn roof; and we were off the grid for 12 days. I say it that way because we have a generator, so I was able to provide warm meals and showers for a lot of the neighbors and relatives for quite some time. It was really impressive when you see what happened as far away as we were, and there were many inland areas – because we are heavily forested – that were without power and off the grid for two weeks or even [more]. It was very expensive and [put] a lot of hardship on people, not to mention what happened along the shore, and of course Staten Island in New York is a community that still has a long way to go to come back. It was major.

DALTON: We’ll get into more of the implications of Sandy, and the cost of rebuilding. Governor Ritter, it seems like Colorado’s on fire a lot lately, every time we look in the news. How have the forest fires affected you and your state?

BILL RITTER, JR.: Well, they’ve affected the state a lot more than me personally. We had two major fires last year. I had one serious fire when I was governor and a couple of tornadoes, but last year, two significant fires, one of which was a record breaker in terms of homes lost, and then we turned around this year – in fact, this month – and broke that record; 369 homes were lost in this most recent fire.

There are huge implications. You lose the homes, certainly, and that’s economically devastating to communities and personally devastating to the families; and you lose that infrastructure as well, so the counties – the municipalities – are out, and the insurance industry has to really evaluate the loss, but also re-evaluate the risk based on two years in a row of serious, serious fires. Drought conditions in this part of the state – 4 million acres of pine beetles killed, pretty much related to drought and dryness and, I would say, climate change. Our aspens, which aren’t affected by pine beetles – there’s probably a 15 percent kill rate from a fungus there that still has everything to do with climate change and with just being vulnerable because of the dry weather, the drought conditions, the longer seasons for things like pine beetles now – that’s two life cycles in one season, where it used to have one. There’s a variety of ways to think about this. Actually, none of the areas that have been victimized by these forest fires are serious pine beetle areas. One of the fires got into some pine beetles. It didn’t burn faster than the rest, but we’ve had a lot of pine beetles killed that’s a part of this as well, so it’s a combination of drought, dry conditions and longer dry, warm seasons that really are impacting us in a pretty serious way for fires.

DALTON: There have been droughts. The year 2012 was the hottest year on record. There have been floods in some areas. How is this affecting the national political debate or the public awareness? Governor Whitman?

WHITMAN: Not enough. That, to my mind, is what’s so frustrating. You see this happening. The insurance companies called last year annus horribilis because of what they had to put out, and that was before they had to put it out for other major storms. We’re seeing the hundred-year flood every two or three years now. Even for people who want to argue over, “Is it climate change?” or, “Do humans have an impact on it?” – at least they’ve got to start thinking about, well, something is happening and we’ve got to start preparing for it.

Part of what drives up the cost of forest fires, and of things like the floods and Super Storm Sandy, is the fact that we’re building in places where we haven’t built before – particularly in states like Colorado and [across] the west, but also along the shore we’re rebuilding in communities. They’ve been there for a long time. I understand how difficult it is to take on this issue, but we’re going to have to look at: Should we be rebuilding in some of the places that we’re rebuilding, and if so, do we do it in a different way? That is something we’re seeing the towns start to take on. The local people get it; that’s why the states are the laboratories of democracy, because governors have to deliver. We see it happening and we have to pay for it, and so governors tend to step up where the federal government doesn’t and say, “This is how we’re going to address this issue.”

DALTON: Let’s talk about the Jersey shore. Is rebuilding happening in places that it shouldn’t? If not, then what about a person who loses some property? Do they then get paid by the government?

WHITMAN: Right now, the governor is looking at buying out a whole bunch of homes in places where he doesn’t think redevelopment should take place. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] just came out with their maps – he’d adopted their maps before they were finalized – and what’s interesting is, the governor adopted the FEMA maps when they were just proposals. FEMA came out with the finalized maps earlier this week, and they took a number of areas out of the flood-prone designation. But people had already started to rebuild based on what the governor had said, so they had put them up on stilts. A number of the homeowners who were interviewed, [and were asked], “Did you regret having gone aheadand putting them up on stilts when now you find you didn’t need to?” They were all saying, “No. No, we get it. We get it, this might happen.”

RITTER: It’s interesting; in the Netherlands, where so much of the land is under sea level, they now have developed floating homes. They’re building floating homes, which people apparently think is a great idea, and I can see it. Different states, different countries, are going to adapt in different ways, but there are a whole lot of innovative things that can happen, whether it’s clear cutting or building up on stilts or building floating homes.

When I say clear cutting, I don’t mean chopping down the entire forest, but cutting a firewall around your border that takes trees out so that you don’t have pines that are going to burn that are five or ten feet away from the house. We actually put money together, as this governor did, in a variety of things legislatively, even in the downturn, where we were devoting money to going out and looking at houses that were a fire hazard, that were built up against the forest, and saying, “You need to remove this much forest from around your property in order to protect your home and your garage.”

DALTON: Part of what you’re talking about is elected officials going to citizens and voters and saying, “Your costs are going to go up. You’re going to either pay more for insurance, or somehow the government’s going to have taxes to take care of these things that we’ve created, these risks that we’ve created.” Is that fair to say?

WHITMAN: The public is beginning to understand that. I mean, we all pay for the rebuilding, whether it’s in New Jersey or Colorado or Oklahoma. It affects and impacts all of us, because these costs are so massive that no locality, no state, can do it all themselves. This is one of the roles of the federal government. When you have a crisis, when people are devastated, that’s one of the roles, to step in and help, but guess whose money that is? That’s all of our money, so we have a vested interest in trying to be proactive in limiting and reducing those costs. Again, if you want to just skip the whole discussion of whether it’s climate change or not, just say, “We know something is happening, and guess what? We’d better take some steps, do the best we can to be proactive in reducing those costs and the impacts.”

RITTER: We pay for it during, and we pay for it after, you know? It’s county government that’s involved at the very first level, and then they call in the state. The state looks and sees if they have the resources to manage the response, and then the governor calls in the federal government and asks the federal government to become involved. That’s all taxpayer dollars that are paying for that. Then, if insurance companies aren’t elevating the risk, because someone’s living in a forest or living on the coast – if they don’t elevate the premium for doing that, we wind up paying, because we’re part of the same risk pool.

DALTON: At some point, scientists say that Super Storm Sandy is not the new normal; that there will be more, bigger extremes; that there’s more of this to come. At what point will the federal government no longer bail out states? At some point there’s a real financial risk there, where Uncle Sam runs out of money.

WHITMAN: Uncle Sam is out of money. [Laughter] We’re printing money. We have a federal deficit that we’re following out of sight. We are already in that position. We do have to start looking at our priorities again and assessing where it is we want to spend money. What are the things for which the federal government’s responsible, what’s going to fall solely on the states, and what’s going to be up to local government and the individual?

As far as, “When do we run out of money?” – we’re there. In a lot of states – for example, New Jersey, on the East Coast – we had a lot of snow, a lot of wet weather, and many of the municipalities in the state blew through their snow-removal budgets – mostly proactively, because there wasn’t so much snow but you had ice conditions. They were out early, and they blew through that. Then you have Super Storm Sandy, and they’ve got to respond to that. Who knows what they’re going to have, and they’ve already had in the last week – they had six inches of rain in three days last week. We’re having flooding, serious flooding, occurring – the opposite of what you’re getting in Colorado, but, you know, those budgets are done. They’re having to come back to the taxpayer and say, “OK; it’s the only way we get the money to be able to pay for these things.”

DALTON: So we’re putting it on our kids’ credit card.

WHITMAN: Yeah.

RITTER: That’s right. Governor Whitman, as you said, the states have more loaded budgets, and so states, by and large, can’t borrow money. We had to balance the budget in Colorado, so when that part of the money ran out we were borrowing from Peter to pay Paul if it was something having to do with emergency management in some situations. For disaster response, you have a limited budget, and you have to rely on the federal government for that, but if your state responsibility goes over and above what you have available, then you might be carving out something from your higher ed budget, or from your K-12 budget, or from your health-care budget. This is not a good place to be, but that’s the place we find ourselves in. Increasingly, states are finding themselves in the position [of] not being able to even provide the kind of state money they once did to this.

DALTON: Governor Whitman, how did Governor Christie handle Sandy?

WHITMAN: It’s been fascinating to me, because this is where Governor Christie has gotten so much criticism from the far Right and the Republican Party, because he acted like a governor. First of all, he was very, very good about the whole storm. He was out ahead of it. He was telling people – using Jersey language – to get the blank off the beach, and don’t be stupid about it, and when they said to evacuate, to evacuate. He was out proactively, because we knew the storm was coming. He was out proactively telling people what they should do, setting up the emergency response. He was right there when it occurred. Then, of course, where he got all this criticism was when the president came in and he welcomed him. Well, you know, if you’ve just had a major storm that has created tens of billions of dollars worth of damage, and killed some people, and devastated a lot of people in communities – I mean, man, when you see a house that’s been moved entirely into the middle of a highway on a bridge, you know you’ve seen some pretty significant damage. The president had been on the phone with him right away, offered him all the assistance that he could, and he holds the key to the kingdom as far as the checkbook. He has to fend for the checkbook. You’re not going to walk away from him.

I’ve talked to Governor Christie about this. He said, “Well, you know, I was brought up with the president of the United States – you show deference to that office.” That’s the way we were brought up. It’s the president. You can not like the politics, whatever, but you respect the office, and that’s what he acted like, and that’s why, I believe, his popularity is so high in New Jersey and nationwide. Except for this group of a few people who control a lot of the rhetoric within my party, he is very well respected for having done exactly that – having acted like a governor and reaching out.

DALTON: Let’s talk about your party. There are a lot in your party who don’t recognize climate science, or climate reality. Do they say one thing publicly and different things privately?

WHITMAN: I’m sure some of them do. I know a lot of them say things publicly that are pretty bad. For instance – and this, to me, epitomizes what I think is wrong with Washington on every subject area, everything has gotten so divisive – after the Oklahoma tornadoes, your senator, Senator Boxer, said that this probably was related to climate change. I don’t know exactly what language she used, or how she qualified it. You can attack her on the science. You can question the conclusion that she drew. But Jim Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma, stood up and he said, “That was immoral.” He stood up and said that it was immoral to have said that.

That’s not about morality. This is about fact. It’s about science. It’s about devastation, not about morality. He made this into a moral issue, and once you do that you can’t find common ground, because if my position is moral and you differ from me, then you’re immoral. You don’t compromise on morality. You can find consensus on a lot of things, but morality sets the bar up to a point where there’s little you can do about it. While I know there are a number of Republicans – of course they understand climate change, and they know we need to do some things – who allow themselves to be pushed around by the more vocal and extreme who tend to define the party because they’re in Washington and that’s where all the press is, and they get good headlines when they say things like that.

That’s just mindless. They’re putting money in and they’re putting pressure on, too, so it is outside influence that does affect so much of this decision-making, and that’s problematic today. Money really does play a huge, huge role.

DALTON: Let’s talk about jobs. Jobs is an area where many people see promise, room for clean technology. Governor Ritter talked about job creation, etcetera – that this is not a bad thing, that there is really a lot of economic opportunity in cleaning up the energy economy.

RITTER: That’s why our center is named Center for the New Energy Economy. We work with the Advanced Energy Economy Institute, out in San Francisco. There is this economic development opportunity here that’s global, and if we don’t take advantage of it, it’s going to be to our detriment as a nation.

In Colorado, when I was running, we said, “Listen. We think that we can use domestic energy sources that are clean, and so they respond to environmental challenges, that actually build the economy and where you can protect rate payers.” We called it the Four Es, and this is this great framework for thinking about energy policy. Energy that’s domestic; environmental issues are solved; economic development; and equity – equity for rate payers. We’re not building out an energy system on the back of middle income or lower-middle income or poor people. We saw job creation in Colorado directly resulting from policy levers around clean energy. I signed 57 bills. We became the number-one state in the nation per capita for solar workers. We brought in a major wind turbine manufacturer, the largest in the world at the time, Vestas. It’s not like this is easy stuff, but during the worst downturn since the Great Depression, we saw our clean tech and clean energy space grow. So, one of the other answers to how we solve this is [to] make the business case for clean energy. There’s a lot of folks out there that are doing it.

DALTON: Critics would say that a lot of that happened because of federal stimulus dollars, that President Obama went to Colorado to sign the Stimulus Act, and that there’s a lot of subsidy in those numbers you just cited.

RITTER: I think the Stimulus Act had a lot in it, but we were already moving on that agenda, and a lot of our success had everything to do with the things we did apart from the Recovery Act. The Recovery Act brought in clean energy dollars – I think around the weatherization side, the clean energy side, the state energy programs had a lot to spend, but it came and went. We’ve been able to sustain this energy economy, a clean energy economy, even under harsh economic times. I would say that the Recovery Act helped – there was some stimulus effect of that; there was a bit of a lag effect, so there were people who were suspicious of it or questioning it – but if you look around the country, states that are doing it apart from the Recovery Act, if they have a serious intent on a clean-energy policy, you can see the impact on the job numbers. There’s great economic modeling from land grant universities across this country that demonstrate it.

WHITMAN: I absolutely agree that the green energy economy has enormous potential at all different levels, and one of those – and I know it’s not everybody’s idea of green energy – is nuclear. There are four new power plants – well, there are five, but one was previously licensed, so four totally new power plants – being built today in this country; two are in Georgia and two are in South Carolina. They [have] up to 3,000 workers full time during construction. Once they’re built, there’ll be 500-700 full-time permanent jobs there that pay about 35 percent more than a similar job in that area. It’s everything from sanitary engineers to nuclear engineers, mechanics and everybody. There are lots of potential jobs in that, and it’s the only form of base power that doesn’t release any regulated pollutants or greenhouse gases while it’s producing power.

It is something, I think, to be considered, and even if we don’t bring on any new nuclear energy in this country, there are four reactors currently being built in China that are using the Westinghouse AP 1000 technology, and those are providing some 19,000 jobs here in the United States. As you say, it can be worldwide, and when I look at some of the manufacturing potential we have to produce the various bits and pieces that go – whether it’s with wind turbines, or solar panels, or nuclear reactors – we can do that here, and we have a great potential to do that.

DALTON: But with nuclear waste, how could you call nuclear “clean”?

WHITMAN: If you took all of the nuclear waste that we have, from the 104 reactors around the country that have been operating for over 50 years, if you put them in one place, they’d fill up one football field to the height of the goalposts. They’re all around the country, unfortunately, and that’s another thing that Congress needs to act on. Congress decided that there should be one national repository. They said it should be Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

As taxpayers and as ratepayers, we have spent billions of dollars to get Yucca Mountain ready, and as long as Harry Reid is [leader] of the Senate it will never happen. The president appointed another commission to look at it, and they’ve said, “We ought to find a couple of sites, then,” and they’re working on that and there are actually communities that have come forward and have said, “We’ll take it,” but the real thing there is that you have between 95 and 97 percent fissionable material, unused energy, in those rods today. You can reduce that, as they have in France and Japan, through processing to 3 to 5 percent, so you’re dealing with a much smaller amount. Now, that’s highly enriched plutonium at that point, but they have figured out how to – and I’m not a scientist, so I can’t tell you how – ensure that that can never be used for weapons. So we need to look at this, and we shouldn’t just say, “No way, no how;” we need to look at it as we look at the whole issue of climate change and clean air.

RITTER: If you remember the president’s State of the Union in 2011, he was talking about reducing our emissions by 80 percent – or maybe having 80 percent of our energy be produced from clean energy, and he included natural gas and nuclear as a part of that – by 2035. Fukushima happened 10 days later. I think there’s a political problem. Southern California, with the San Onofre plant, is an example of where a plant has shut down. But I think you go back to this framework and you say, “Can you do it domestically? Does it create jobs? Can you solve environmental challenges and hold rate payers harmless, or at least protect them?” If in fact it fits within that construct, it could be – it should be – a part of a clean energy framework.

DALTON: What grade would you give the Obama administration on clean energy and climate?

RITTER: I’m actually doing all I can to help the president in a variety of ways around clean energy. I don’t like to give grades, actually, because I got graded as a governor [laughter] and I always thought it was pretty unfair, because circumstances mean a lot.

I think this president was handed the most serious economic situation since President Roosevelt. I sat with him when I was governor, and with the rest of the governors in the country. I think all 50 were there; that’s unusual to get that many together. He wasn’t president yet, but people there [were] telling him, “Here are the economic straits my state’s in. You have to do stimulus.” As an executive, you use up a lot of political capital doing something as significant as a stimulus package in your first month in office. He burned up a lot of political capital. He was bound and determined to pass health care; he spent the next year, really spending the rest of his political capital passing health care.

You can question whether or not that was the right thing, but he’s made a lot of important strides; agency authority has been used in a pretty aggressive way. There have been a variety of things both at DOE and EPA, at the United States Department of Agriculture, where they’ve done important things in trying to advance this agenda, but there’s been an impasse in Congress, and that makes it difficult to say, “This president’s done really well,” or [“This president has] done poorly,” because he hasn’t had a Congress that will work with him on it, and because they’ve tried to do a variety of things with executive authority and some of that – in the last part of his term he did that without much political capital.

WHITMAN: There have been stutter starts. It’s been the problem that he’s had in a lot of these issues overall; he’ll put out an idea of what he wants, but not an administration bill, and not a really specific framework to say, “This is how I want you to approach this.” That makes it very hard, particularly with as dysfunctional a Congress as we have, to get a lot done. Again, you will hear him say something and then you don’t hear anything more about it.

The president’s got to lead. I agree. He’s used a lot of political capital. He did it right at the start with the stimulus but then particularly with health care, and we can [agree] or disagree on whether that capital was worth using in the way that he did, but it’s been starting and stopping. With EPA, you’ll see [that] they’ll be told and pushed, and they’ll put out a reg, and then all of a sudden they’ll back off it. You always get sued. Any regulation that EPA puts out, you get sued. There’s no question about that, but sometimes they don’t even wait for that. Now, part of that is, in fairness, a reaction to the Congress that won’t do anything, and they have –

RITTER: In 2011, Congress took 191 votes to erode the authority of the EPA. How many votes did you ever have to erode your authority in –

WHITMAN: We had quite a few, but not like that. There’s no question about it, and Congress has just become a real roadblock to progress in this area. I wished we had seen more, though I will say they’ve put money – a good amount of money, now – into research and development in the Department of Energy on green technologies, on small modular reactors for nuclear. They’re taking these initiatives.

DALTON: Jim Hansen from NASA has said that if we burn the oil in the Alberta tar sands, it’s game over for the climate. That may happen, but it sounds like a suicidal mission.

RITTER: I have a lot of respect for Jim Hansen, but I also know what it’s like to govern, and to be in a decision-making position where you’re trying to think about how to move this agenda forward, and what are the biggest things that need to be done. I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s game over, from my perspective. There are other people out there that say, “Look at all the fossil fuel reserves in the world; 80 percent of them have to stay in the ground for us to reduce global emissions – 80 percent by 2050. I think that may be another way to think about it, right? We can’t look at all of the world’s reserves and believe that over time we can expend those fully and still be able to reduce emissions at the level that we need to by 2050. What we need to do, again, is think about this from an emissions perspective, but I think so much attention’s been paid to the Keystone pipeline that we’ve lost our focus on these other places that actually are dramatic – in my mind – things we need to do now in order to transform our energy sector.

WHITMAN: In the best of all possible worlds, I don’t want to see it. I hate coal and tar. The extraction is dirty; there’s no good way to do it. It’s bad, but I agree with the governor. It’s going to happen.

So if it’s going to happen, then you say, “All right. What’s the worst carbon footprint, or the least bad carbon footprint?” Probably bringing it to the United States through the Keystone pipeline, as long as that pipeline has been moved – as it has been, several times, to avoid some of the most environmentally sensitive areas – is probably the best we can do. It’s something that I don’t envy the president having to address at all, because it’s not the way we want to do it. I think we’ve got to start talking more and more about conservation, and empowering people to figure out the ways that they can reduce their input. People tend to think about just themselves, and they say, “If I unplug my iPad after I’ve charged it, what big difference is that going to make?” You know what? If you do it, and your neighbor does it, and your son does it, and your uncle does it, all of a sudden you’re having an impact. It’s like water and watersheds. You’ve got to get people thinking about cumulative impact and the actions that we can take, individually, that actually will have some effect. That’s another place where government can have a role.